Tuesday, October 14, 2003
Life as a Design Icon
I don’t think I’m giving away any industry secrets to identify my dear friend Charles as not just a professional computer artist, but as the Artistic Director for The Sims, the best-selling computer game ever produced. It’s a game I have not spent much time playing, but which I can explain thus: you create a person, or a family, with certain personality traits; you then build them a house using materials you choose yourself, and furnish it to your tastes (constrained mainly by limited “funds"); and then you let your character live in the home you have built, directing him or her to get a job, to make friends, to make money for more furnishings or additional construction, to cook food and clean up, to relieve himself or bathe herself as personal needs dictate. If you ignore your character’s needs, be they social, biological, or aesthetic, your character will mope and become unproductive. It’s a fascinating microcosm, and one which has lured millions of dedicated players worldwide.
Charles and his wife Lori are true aesthetes. Lori is a brilliant art photographer; Charles is a genius in the kitchen and as good drawing with a pencil as creating images on the computer screen. Between the two of them they seem to know just about everything in the world. Being in their company both renders me sublimely happy and makes me feel a bit simpleminded. I love them both.
It is therefore with great hubris and self-importance that I can report that Charles came to our house a while ago to peruse and sketch and take a few photos. He’s visited before, of course, countless times in the dozen years we’ve been good friends. But this time he had come with a professional purpose - to analyze our decor: our couches, chairs, tables, wall hangings, carpets, and arrangements. The next version of The Sims was being created, and he wanted ideas.
Over the past weekend I visited Charles so he could scan a few of my photos into digital format. (Yes yes I’ll get to posting them eventually, it’s not like I’m not also performing brain surgeries and synthesizing new elements in my spare time.) He mentioned to me, during my visit with him, that the “Club Line” was complete. The Club Line is the set of Sims furnishings and housewares he has created based on Kel and my flat, featuring a blend of mission and stickley styles, french Metro Deco patterns, Latin-American vibrancy and east asian zenitudes. Our humble abode will be a template for millions of new cyberhomes around the world in a way that no showplace in Architectural Digest or Elle Decor can hope to be. Our entertainment console and terra cotta lamps, our mexican skulls and overstuffed couches, our mission rocker and bright yellow table and so many more items that we’ve painstakingly assembled over years - all these have been appropriated by Simdom. I could not be prouder. It’s enough to make me start playing computer games - except I’m already living in one.
I’m in LA on Wednesday. I’ll catch up with you when I’m back in my stylish yet comfortable apartment. You’ll recognize it by the air of cool sophistication. I’ll be the guy dancing around in it to funky jazz in his underware. I think they’re leaving that part out of the game, for obvious commercial reasons.
